Midwest Memo
Green friendly?
by Alan Shultz

I dabbled in conservation over the weekend by attending a green festival held in conjunction with Earth Day.

Those of us in attendance gathered in a huge convention center. It was a warm day. Outside the breeze was pleasant. Inside the air conditioning was cranked up high. The air conditioner compressors whirled away, pumping the artificial cool inside.

We sat in big rooms with no windows. The lights overhead were all turned on. The electric meter was running big time. Unlike the Girl Scouts, we didn't bring our homemade situpons for this gathering. We sat in theater seats of synthetic upholstery or on plastic chairs.

From what I could tell, none of us brought a sack lunch to eat.

There were vendors to take care of meals. They dished up a wide menu array served on plastic plates. Plastic utensils were provided. Little individual salts and peppers in little paper packages spiced things up. The trash generated was huge.

Few of us drank from the water fountain. Maybe one percent of the crowd took their H2O the old fashioned way.

But there was bottled water to buy by the pint and the quart. The water came in one-time use plastic containers.

Given the subject matter and the vast numbers of us, we weren't asked to do anything while we gathered together. We weren't asked to plant a tree, dig a ditch or even break a sweat. Instead, shopping seemed the big activity.

Rows and rows of vendors hawked every "natural" product imaginable and lots of us had the plastic credit cards out buying environmentally friendly stuff.

At one seminar I attended the presenter was very evasive. She described the cooperative where she lives. They use very little water, hardly any electricity. They don't "flush" much.

Someone in the audience asked how large the cooperative was.

"Very small," she answered.

Another person asked if she could join the cooperative.

"Oh it's very, very small," she expounded. "No room," she added

The presenter seemed, well, suspicious like she lived alone or with one other person and that she had elevated that life style to something it wasn't. It seemed she took credit for it just a tad too much.

A Washington lobbyist spoke to us after the suspicious young lady. He said political action is the only way to go. "These individual efforts are nice," he said, but the politics and the economic factor - that's where the action and the potential for change is, according to him.

The lobbyist let his hair down at one point and his candor got him into trouble with the audience.

"Imagine there is a little balloon over your conservative Congressperson's head," the lobbyist said. He was referring to the balloon in the comic strips that tells you what the

character is thinking.

"If you are talking to the Congressperson about doing without power or water or radical life style changes, well that little balloon says one thing only," he explained.

"It says....nut case."

Boos and indignation rose up out of the audience.

It was less than inspiring.

I'm all for conservation. And I'd like to be educated on what makes a difference and what is a waste of time.

I don't like silly.

For Earth Day, Oprah was on television hawking cloth bags to use to buy produce from the grocery. She sells them on her web site. The washable bags are supposed to replace disposable paper or plastic bags.

Nothing was said, however, about the comparable energy use of washing that reusable bag compared to disposing of a paper bag.

User friendly facts that would be helpful.

If Oprah forgoes just one spur-of-the-moment private jet flight to Paris to shop, would that allow us to retire our disposable cloth produce bags?

Like Kermit the frog says - "It's not easy being green," to which I might add, "but it sure is easy to act righteous and look silly."